


Slow Burn

by ficlicious



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. References, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Asgardian Magic, Ceiling Vent Clint Barton, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Sex Pollen, The Author Regrets Nothing, Tony Stark Hates Magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 16:43:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9557636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: Like any great love story, it starts with ventilation shafts, falling out of the ceiling, and a hefty dose of sex pollen.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justanotherpipedream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherpipedream/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Spy Who Loved Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8566126) by [justanotherpipedream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherpipedream/pseuds/justanotherpipedream). 



Clint’s in the vents again. He doesn’t really have a good excuse for it, but he’s pretty sure if anyone asked him, he could come up with one on the fly. At first, it was a way to escape responsibility. He loves being an agent, and even if he didn't, it's a far better gig than the circus had been, but some parts of it, he could do without. Agent Coulson's piles of paperwork and after-action reports rank high on that list.

Then, it becomes a game. How far can he get before the intruder detection systems find him and force him back out into the hallways and rooms of the Helicarrier? How long can he stay hidden from whatever agent's been dispatched to track him down and drag him back to Coulson? Can he make it into Fury's office undetected? Can he beat the record he set the last time he crawled into the vents?

And then... then he’s just bored and has nothing else to do, so he goes exploring. The Helicarrier is full of interesting twists and turns, and despite it being of finite size — he thinks — he always manages to get lost within ten minutes of clambering into the nearest vent. Even though he always has his bearings the second his feet touch down on the deck again after leaving the vents, he’s utterly baffled how the mental map he keeps in his head of his route got him six decks up and three sections over.

It is a good thing, he decides, shimmying through what any sane person would think was a touch narrow a squeeze, he’s a man of good character, because the shit he’s overhearing and overseeing as he passes AC panels and vent screens is the kind of shit that ends careers.

Though he’s gotta say, he thinks as he pauses long enough to watch Ward put on a _killer_ impression of Fury to a briefing room full of junior agents, he’d also be set for life if he ever had the whim to engage in a little creative blackmailing. There are things even he knows is wiser to keep his mouth shut about— he pauses beside another open vent just long enough to hear Bobbi’s high, lilting laugh and a rough, deeper baritone chuckle as she strips Hunter of his pants — but he’s going to be King of the Watercooler Gossip for weeks at this rate.

A few minutes later, as he scrambles as quietly as panic allows _the fuck away_ from Romanoff’s rooms, he desperately wishes he had some brain bleach, because the glimpse he caught of her naked and writhing against the wall with Agent Coulson industriously pounding into her _is going to haunt him for fucking ever._

He takes corners at random, barely paying attention because his brain is looping back on _what the actual fuck_ too fast to allow any other thought to parse. And that’s how he meets the girl of his dreams.

Well, if he's being honest, it's really then he crashes into the girl of his dreams when his hand comes down expecting to find duct and shoves right through a poorly-latched vent panel, and he falls ass-first into her workshop as she’s walking directly underneath it.

Her verbal flaying of Clint is vicious and pointed, when she gets breath back in the lungs he’d knocked the wind out of, and if he thought the Widow was frightening, this woman is downright terrifying, with the flashing blue eyes and the scowl and the waving hands. Clint just sits, staring up with wide eyes, as she invents on the fly creative and physically challenging ways for him to go fuck himself.

By the time her tirade really hits its stride, he’s pretty sure he’s halfway in love. When she’s shoving him through the door fifteen minutes later, after another verbal lambasting questioning his competency, his lineage and his right to even breathe, he’s definitely sure he’s all the way in love.

It isn’t until days later that he learns her name, when he breaks some shiny piece of tech he was supposed to be field testing, and Sitwell commiserates with him that he has to face the dragon after breaking one of her toys.

“Who?” he asks, after swallowing his mouthful of whatever the Helicarrier kitchen is passing off as chicken tikka.

Sitwell just stares. “The dragon. Toni Stark, division chief of R&D?”

Clint finds himself smiling. “Black hair, blue eyes, a mouth that puts a sailor to shame?”

Sitwell’s eyebrow goes up. “That’s her. Most people don’t look so happy to have to face her wrath. And I mean that literally. Agents have been known to go missing from her office.”

“She’s not so bad,” Clint says happily, and twenty minutes later, when he knocks on her door and presents her with the shattered remnants of whatever the gadget had been before he field tested it into fragments, he’s ready and oh-so-willing for her to tear him a new one.

But there’s no tirade this time, no explosion of words and windmilling gestures. No flashing eyes or color high in her cheeks. She doesn’t even look at him when she takes the box of rattling electronics from him, just mumbles a thank you and then turns her back and ignores him completely.

He’s not sure if that means she likes him, or if it means she thinks he’s not worth the time to give him so much as a stern scolding. He approaches Romanoff, braving her unimpressed look and the memory he hasn’t quite managed to repress of her and Coulson to ask her if she knows anything about Toni, and discovers that Natasha considers Toni her best friend. That fact is less helpful than he hopes, because when he asks if Toni’s said anything about him, all Natasha does is quirk an eyebrow at him over her cup of coffee, and tell him flatly that if he can’t figure it out for himself, he’s a fucking moron.

So he breaks more of Toni’s doohickeys, mostly on purpose, usually after the doohickey either fails or succeeds so he’s not screwing up her data too badly, and the closest he ever gets to one of her legendary rants is a clenching jaw and a twitching eyelid when he passes back his new bow.

(He really regrets the one that got _that_ reaction, one of the few true accidents in his growing tally of Toni’s Broken Toys. That bow had been goddamn _perfect_ , balanced in his hand like it had been molded for his grip, accuracy tuned for his uncanny vision, so light it felt like air to pull and loose.)

It's not that she's suddenly become a kinder, gentler Toni overnight either. Other agents are still reporting terrifying encounters with the tyrant of R&D, and it flat out mystifies him that he can break the shiniest of her stuff, and all she does is mumble _thanks_ and goes right back to pretending he doesn't exist.

It’s baffling. It’s surreal. It’s kind of insulting.

It’s a challenge, he finally decides, and he’s never failed to do anything but rise to those.

\------

For a man who has just broken seven of the shiniest gadgets he’s ever had his hands on, Clint’s in a surprisingly upbeat mood. There are signs of total disaster looming on the horizon, probably in the form of Coulson’s endless mountains of paperwork and Fury’s apoplectic scowls when it comes time to tally up the profit-loss on these doohickeys, but Clint doesn’t care. He’s got a duffel full of wires and shards, broken lights and singed buttons to drop in the return bin at Toni’s lab.

Most of them weren’t even intentional, and broke under the strain of field testing which is what he was supposed to do as a field tester, but he doesn’t expect that point to play in his favor. If anything’s going to pull Toni out of her strange apathy towards him, it’s going to be this duffel on his shoulder. She’s going to have to react to the mess he’s returning and it is going to be _glorious._

He’s so busy with his self-congratulations he fails to see Natasha until she’s materialized out of thin air and has fallen into step beside him. “I think you have a death wish,” she says casually, as his heart leaps into the back of his throat and tries to escape out his nose. “I can’t tell you why she hasn’t already killed you, but if you keep returning her things like this, she is one hundred percent going to crush you like an insect.”

“I’m too cute to crush,” he scoffs, even though he’s not at all sure Natasha’s wrong on Toni’s reaction and unease prickles along his shoulderblades. He chalks it up to the chilly backwash from the incoming quinjet just touching down in the hangar bay outside, and he watches for a second as crews bustle forward, taking gear and cargo from the two agents disembarking. “I thought Carter and Morse weren’t due back from Asgard for another two days.”

“Don’t change the subject, Clint,” Natasha says, and whaps him upside the head with a firm, surprisingly gentle, palm. “If you keep antagonizing her like this, you’re going to regret it.”

“I’m already regretting it,” he grumbles as he rubs the spot she smacked. “And that woman is made of titanium. Nothing so far has made her bat an eyelash. I doubt I could so much as dent her, no matter what I do.”

“You might be surprised what you could do to her without knowing you’re doing it,” Natasha says acidly, then has to step away from him when the crew handling the quinjet’s cargo comes up behind them, shouting standard warnings about biological hazards and alien plant life. Clint loses her in the surge of activity as the hall clears for the crew to hustle down the hall.

“She’s made of titanium,” Clint mutters to himself, though he has no doubt Natasha’s heard him. Just because she’s out of sight doesn’t mean she isn’t hanging around. Unease prickles across his shoulders, settles into a stone in the pit of his stomach, and for the first time, he wonders if he’s on the right path, breaking Toni’s shit just to see if he can get a reaction that isn’t bland and dismissive.

 _Just Natasha fucking with my head,_ he tells himself, and shoulders the duffel to carry on towards Toni’s lab. Even if he wanted to change course now, he’s already broken everything, and there’s no going back now.

So he goes forward.

Straight into Toni, who’s rounding the same corner he is from the other direction, attention completely on the Starkpad in her hands. With yelping and flailing and tangling limbs, they crash to the floor, and Clint has just enough presence of mind to twist as they fall, so he takes the brunt of impact with the floor.

 _This is nice,_ he thinks hazily, because he can’t breathe with the wind knocked out of him, and he’s sure he’s developing a nice lump on the back of his skull, but as good as he thought Toni’d feel sprawled on top of him, it’s nothing compared to the reality.

Her hair smells like vanilla, coffee and rich metal. It’s the most erotic thing he’s ever smelled.

He has problems. He’s okay with his problems.

“Agent Barton,” Toni says after clearing her throat a couple of times, and stares down at him from the curtain of her hair in a way that would steal the breath out of his lungs, if the fall to the deck hadn’t done that already, “do you have something against me?”

“No,” he wheezes, and gives her his very best _love-me-I’m-adorable_ smile which, he’s disgruntled to discover, does nothing to lessen the irritated furrow between her eyes. He coughs until his eyes are watering and his lungs have reinflated.

“Then _why,_ ” she continues, shoving away from him to sit beside him and glare, “do you keep tackling me to the ground?”

Half a dozen quippy one-liners spring to mind, each of less subtle innuendo than the last, but he swallows them all down in favor of scrubbing the back of his head sheepishly and saying, “Luck?”

“You’re a goddamn black cat,” she mutters, shoving a hand through her hair and reaching for her Starkpad. She freezes, eyes locked on the duffel he dropped when they collided, and she swallows convulsively. “Agent Barton?”

He grins a tiny grin. “Yes?”

Her mouth opens and closes, and she shakes her head slowly. “Agent Barton.”

His grin widens. “Yes.”

A muscle in her jaw jumps, color floods into her cheeks and she squeezes her eyes shut, massaging her forehead with her free hand. “ _Agent_. _Barton_.”

Her tone is laden with ominous things. It spells his doom. In the stresses she puts on his rank and name, he can sense his very painful, very messy dismembering using the most creative and unconventional tools she can get her hands on.

And it’s _awesome._

“That’s me,” he says cheerfully, and braces for the explosion that _has_ to be coming.

Toni gets as far as opening her mouth, with eyes flashing and his execution imminent, and then an agent rounding the corner of the hall yelps and trips over Toni’s Starkpad, knocking Toni into Clint before crashing atop them both and driving the wind right out of Clint’s lungs again. With a bonus skull contusion from the metal and glass specimen box the agent had been carrying, no less.

“I fucking hate you,” Toni wheezes from where she’s squashed between them.

“Valid,” he croaks, trying to focus on her face through the grey spots in his vision and the strands of her hair plastered over his eyes. “I kinda hate me too.”

“Oh shit,” the agent says, and Clint can’t see him through Toni’s head, but he knows panic when he hears it. “Did the box come open? Please tell me the box didn’t come open.”

He doesn’t need to look. He doesn’t need to see the thunderous expression on Toni’s face. He doesn’t need to even ask. Clint already knows the box is fucking open. Of course it is. Because that’s just the kind of luck he has.


End file.
